The Beauty of Lining a River With Willow

In the Stone Age, Neolithic folks used willow branches and mud to build roundhouses for their families. Jump forward several thousand years and European farmers were fashioning panels of stitched willow, called hurdles, to fence their farms or screen their gardens. Meanwhile, Native Americans constructed frames of black willow stakes and branches for the sweat lodges where their spirits were purified.

Today, dozens of species of willow are fitting into the toolkits of ecologists and conservationists, who find these trees fine specimens for preventing the decimation of the Ohio River Basin. By incorporating willow, their aim is to minimize erosion while keeping its seven major tributaries as free of pollutants as possible.

That basin, the largest riparian offshoot of the Mississippi, is one of its most precarious, mainly as a result of unpredictable flows and decades of pollution from the likes of power plant drainage and fertilizer runoff. Riverbanks in the Cincinnati area and in Appalachian Ohio, experts say, need to be stabilized not just to keep farmland and townships flood-free, but to keep the waters — from the Muskingum to the Little Miami — flowing rhythmically and consistently southeastward into the Mississippi.

And willows, conservationists and growers say, may be one of the most sustainable, two-birds-one-stone fixes to getting that done.

“What’s not to love?” says Amy Stewart, owner of 65Willows, a willow farm 20 minutes west of Cincinnati. “They are incredibly easy to propagate. They grow like weeds. They grow on every continent in the world except for Antarctica. They’re very adaptable. They don’t particularly care what kind of soil they’re in. And they are great for riverbanks because they’re water loving plants.”

If I’m the head of a conservancy district or the Ohio Department of Natural Resources, my traditional route to firming up banks and bends is reaching for rocks — riprap, loose stone tossed in heaps, or a slanted slope of concrete. The issue in someone like Stewart’s mind is that that rock, which can cost hundreds of dollars per ton, isn’t doing much other than one, singular task: Preventing erosion.

What farms like 65Willows can do is provide conservationists with live willow stakes (rods ready to green) that they can use instead. These conservationists will stick thousands of stakes, buds-up, into the riverbank in a zigzag, diamond pattern, miles at a time, with the hope that in three to four months their roots will lodge tightly into the earth, creating an underground patchwork strong enough to keep high waters at bay.

Although willow posting has been a practice since the early 1990s in Ohio, with the restoration of the Mohican River, the method of staking riverbanks has been resurfacing in the past five years, as conservancies spend pandemic-era dollars gathering willow rods from nearby farms for about $1 a stake, or sometimes just gratis.

They’re being planted up on the Chagrin River in Cuyahoga County; to help restore Mill Creek and Paddy’s Run outside Cincinnati; up in Northeast Ohio, where volunteers have been staking the Maumee River.

And recently, teams at the Ohio River Foundation (ORF) have been using Black and Sandbar Willow to keep Twin Creek, a tributary of the Great Miami River, flowing soundly.

Jessica Rice, the restoration project manager at ORF who led three plantings at Twin Creek over the years, says the co-benefits of staking go beyond what the human eye can typically discern.

Yes, willows are green and prettier to look at than concrete. And they’re cheaper than riprap and rock jetties. But, as limnologists — scientists who study inland bodies of water such as lakes, rivers and wetlands — who plant with her know, willows, being so comfortable with wetlands in the first place, come with the added benefit that they are almost like natural sieves. They soak out nutrients from creeks and streams that will, in turn, strengthen the soil they’re locked into.

“And they’re going to produce habitat for things above the water,” Rice says, like mink and beavers. (The latter also being a possible menace, using stakes as building material.) “They’re going to create shade that hangs over the water, which will also keep the water temperatures lower, which is beneficial for fish and macroinvertebrates.”

Sarah Benton found the same when planting stakes along the Hocking, Muskingum and Shade rivers. A watershed project manager for Rural Action, a nonprofit geared towards watershed restoration, Benton has witnessed her own multi-use for the species. She found that the willow rods that help purify acidic water run-off through limestone beds are the same ones she can use, for free, to stake along Chase Run, or privately at the Future Days Farm in Albany, Ohio.

But just because willow is low cost, acts as a natural purifier and is loved by nearly every species that may scamper nearby, this doesn’t mean it’s without caveats. Unlike riprap or concrete, willow stakes need about three months to grow secure along the riverbank. And there’s no guarantee, Benton says, that an armored creekside will hold steady throughout flood season.

“I don’t want to […] give folks the idea that willow staking is a silver bullet,” Benton says. “It’s just easy to do and there are a lot of co-benefits to doing it.”

Of course, it’s good business as well for a willow farm.

Howard Peller, a basket farmer who owns Living Willow Farm in Roseville, Ohio (“Probably the largest willow farm in the country,” he says), doesn’t really need to help stabilize riverbanks. He makes a great living already constructing domes, huts and fences that will cost clients thousands.

Following a wattling workshop on the Blackstone River outside of Pittsburgh, Peller is now also considering doing a bunch more staking on his own farm.

“It’s the biggest thing I’d encourage people raising cattle [to adopt],” Peller says. Especially those looking for the right cover crop, pragmatic crops planted to keep land idle, to prevent soil from eroding.

Maybe that’s why 65Willows’ Stewart is so gung-ho about the plant she’s dedicated her life to. (One source called her Ohio’s Willow Queen.)

Besides the coracles she and her family want to build (out of willow, of course) next summer, Stewart is aiming to stake several streams at 65Willows with her own product come March, when the freshly planted crop starts to take off. All for a good reason: Most of the 200 acres of the Stewarts’ farm is low-ground area alongside the Great Miami River. “And every year it floods,” she said.

Hence: grow, plant, grow, plant.

“But it’s not going to stop flooding completely,” Stewart says. “So, the thing about willow is, it doesn’t care. If it gets submerged for a month or two, it is fine on the other side of that. It’s not going to grow underwater. But it’s not going to mind a month or two of being submerged.”

Ultimately, Stewart wouldn’t pick any other building material. “I mean, if I wanted to shore up my city walls,” she said, “I would argue for willow, just because it’s a beautiful method to use.”

Scrolling photos courtesy of Howard Peller / Living Willow Farm and the Ohio River Foundation.